How to use your Keyword List for SEO

If you are focusing on improving your SEO, it’s likely that you will have started with your keyword research and compiled a list of possibly hundreds of keywords to better optimise your website. Thankfully, when this is done, the hard part is over and now you just need to successfully incorporate these keywords into your web pages in order to boost where your site ranks on Google and other search engines. However, if you haven’t put together your keyword list just yet, see our quick tips on how to start here.

For those of you with the list at the ready, it can seem a little daunting thinking about how to include every important word or phrase. So, we have put together some helpful tips on how to go about this in a way that will best improve your SEO and site ranking.

1.  Keyword List:

During your research stages you will have noticed the more popular keywords and phrases will be at the top of your list, due to their high search volumes. You will likely be looking to focus on these and that is fine, it just will make standing out a bit harder as these words will be more competitive. What I mean by competitive here is that many other sites will be using these keywords too, which will make it difficult for you.

A way to combat this is to go for longtail versions of the popular words that sit a little lower in your list, and can still generate a decent amount of search volume, but with less competition. Just be selective here and don’t spend too much effort on trying to rank highly for a term that isn’t often searched for. 

2.  Web Pages

It is best to create individual pages that revolve around a certain keyword or phrase. This way you can make it the primary focus, while also peppering the word throughout the page which will improve how it is seen by search engines.

Make sure your web page is optimised so that it ranks highly when a user is searching for that term. Ways to do this are:

• Using the keyword in the <TITLE> tag

• Featuring the word at the top of the web page and at the beginning of the title

• Avoiding clunky repetition that seems unnatural as this will get your page ignored

3.  Prominence

Another thing to watch for is keyword prominence. This is mostly what we touched on within the ways to optimise your web page. When creating a page with a primary keyword in mind, make that term prominent – body text, title tag, meta description – it should be prominent in all of these and scattered elsewhere throughout the page. This will tell the search engine this phrase is important and help it bump you up on the search results for that particular term.

 4.  Keyword Density

This is an interesting concept that allows a search engine to determine the density of your web page i.e. when a user searches for a keyword phrase the search engine will look for the pages that contain this phrase and check the ratio of  the search phrase to the total number of words.

There are tools available that can help with your keyword density research such as SEMRush and HubSpot. Although it isn’t too difficult to keep an eye on this yourself. Just remember that, like all other aspects of SEO, overuse or repetition of a keyword that gives you density of say 50 percent, will be recognised as spamming and your page will be ignored.

5.  Scatter your Keywords

Let’s say someone searches for your chosen keyword and two sites pop up, your website that has a single page referring to the term and the competing site showing numerous pages relating to the topic. In this scenario the latter, your competitor, will be favoured and will rank higher in the search engine, thus stealing your potential customers!

As mentioned, popular keywords are competitive and there may be some phrases you just have to use, regardless of how difficult it is to rank.  Ways that you can combat this is to have multiple pages that feature the term. You may need dozens or even hundreds of pages to grab the search engine’s attention. You can also include plenty of links between pages and from other sites that link back to yours e.g. If you discuss something on a one web page and have more information on that topic elsewhere, link it in your copy.

SEO is a tricky mistress, but if you make use of the tips above you should start to see your website bump up in the ranks. Do remember this won’t happen overnight, it requires time and patience. If you do have more questions about keywords or SEO, please let us know in the comments, or contact us about how we can help you.